As the calendar flips to 2014, it's time to start thinking about the baseball season that grows closer by the day.

Here are thoughts on the American League West, composed while listening to Beyonce's new self-titled album. Why Beyonce for the American League West? Well, Beyonce is from Houston, so it's a natural. Plus, it will be nice to say something positive about Houston in a baseball column.

Actually, that's not entirely fair. The album begins with the song "Pretty Hurts" and the first words are, "Miss Third Ward, your first question: What is your aspiration in life?" Beyonce answers, "Oh, my aspiration in life would be to be happy." That is also true of the Astros. It's just aspiration right now, because Houston is involved in a long-term rebuilding project.

This is a team that lost 111 games in 2013, so you could say there's nowhere to go but up, but that would be a lie because we know that the 1962 Mets lost 120 games and the 2003 Tigers lost 119. The Tigers are most instructive here, because three years later, they were in the World Series. Part of that was because Ivan Rodriguez, a Hall of Fame candidate around the peak of his career, showed up as a free agent in 2004 and expedited the turnaround with both his talent and the mere fact that he was a free agent willing to go to Detroit. More talent followed after that.

The Astros don't have an Ivan Rodriguez this year. They have right-hander Scott Feldman on a three-year, $30 million contract, and a new center fielder acquired via trade in Dexter Fowler. What the Astros do have is a loaded farm system headlined by the past two No. 1 overall draft picks, shortstop Carlos Correa and right-hander Mark Appel, plus sluggers Jonathan Singleton and George Springer.

So, for now, "shine a light on whatever's worst," because the Astros are pretty much bound for another last-place finish in 2014. But when Beyonce asks, "are you happy with yourself?" Houston can say yes, because there is an actual plan in place here and legitimate reason to believe in the future, and that goes into the second Beyonce track, "Haunted," and the young voice that proclaims, "I love you, Houston."

If there's a haunted team in the AL West, it's the Rangers, who have ended the past three years on the wrong end of winner-moves-on, loser-goes-home games. There was Game 7 of the 2011 World Series, the American League wild card game in 2012, and the one-game playoff against the Rays in October to get to the wild card game.

Texas has responded by trading for Prince Fielder and signing Shin-Soo Choo. Fielder's addition cost Ian Kinsler, but that freed the Rangers to install Jurickson Profar as their starting second baseman in a double-play combination with Elvis Andrus that figures to make ground balls exceedingly difficult to get through the infield. Choo means that Nelson Cruz won't be back in Texas, but that's fine because Fielder takes on the slugger role and Choo is an upgrade in the outfield and for his on-base ability.

"You must be on to me," Beyonce sings, but it's hard to say that anyone is on to the Rangers. This is a team without a real perceptible weakness and no reason not to expect a fifth straight 90-win season.

"Drunk in Love" features Jay-Z, and, well, hello Seattle Mariners and Mr. Carter's client, Robinson Cano. Seattle has not been to the playoffs since 2001, and as the offseason goes on, there is no indication that the Mariners will be much better in 2014 than they were in 2013. Cano is a star, for sure, but, "if I do say so myself," as Jay-Z sings, there have not been the necessary upgrades around him to create a contender.

The Mariners signed Corey Hart and traded for Logan Morrison, but those additions came at the cost of two of Seattle's most productive hitters in 2013, Raul Ibanez and Kendrys Morales. The rotation is strong, led by Felix Hernandez and Hisashi Iwakuma, with top prospects Taijuan Walker and James Paxton ready to contribute at the major league level, but where are the runs going to come from?

You can love Cano all you want, but the rest of Seattle's offseason has been a drunk stumble to this point. Is there any objective way to see the Mariners as better than the Rangers now? The A's? The Angels?

Okay, maybe the Angels. "Solve the riddle," Beyonce sings in "Blow." It's actually not that difficult. It has to do with Albert Pujols playing 99 games in 2013, Josh Hamilton posting a .739 OPS, Jered Weaver making only 24 starts, and Jerome Williams being the only starter other than C.J. Wilson to make as many as 25 starts. That's a good recipe for a 78-84 season.

For the Angels, "turn the cherry out" might be a nice suggestion about getting rid of their hideous red alternate jerseys with the red lettering. The only worse alternate jersey in baseball is the Braves' navy-on-navy look. Whatever the Angels wear, though, they should look better in 2014 just based on players performing to their capabilities — unless Hamilton and Pujols really are shells of their former selves. If that's the case, given their contracts, things in Anaheim are going to be very bad for a very long time, regardless of how otherworldly Mike Trout might be.

On "No Angel," Beyonce goes up in pitch to start singing, "Baby, put your arms around me, tell me I'm a problem." If there's a problem with the Oakland A's, it's hard to see what it is. The names might not be flashy, because they hardly ever are, but after a brief post-Moneyball hiccup when everyone caught on to on-base percentage as a market inefficiency and the market corrected itself, Billy Beane is back up to his old tricks.

The new Oakland recipe features one key component of the old one: a strong rotation with Sonny Gray, A.J. Griffin, Jarrod Parker, Dan Straily, and free agent addition Scott Kazmir. There's no true ace, but all five starters could be a No. 2 or No. 3. It's not dissimilar from the way the Atlanta Braves go about things these days, and while the A's don't have Craig Kimbrel in their bullpen, they do have as much of a stockpile of quality relief arms as anyone in baseball, with new additions Jim Johnson and Luke Gregerson offsetting the departure of Grant Balfour in free agency.

If it seems strange that the defending division champions are the last team discussed here, that's just how the A's are — under the radar until they beat you. Oakland's lineup fits this theory well. Is Josh Donaldson going to have another 148 OPS+ season? Maybe not, but there's not a real weak spot. On-base percentage remains a key, and the A's were third in the American League in drawing walks in 2013. There are runners on base constantly, and generally, Oakland is good at putting balls in the air to make things happen. The A's grounded into the fourth-fewest double plays in the American League this past season.

It sets up as another good duel at the top of the division between Oakland and Texas, with the Angels lurking should things break their way. In Beyonce's "Partition," there is a duel for her musical soul — bass beats dropping over clubby rhymes, then a transition into a sexy, slinking croon that comes back into a blend with the first part. "I just wanna be a girl you like, the kind of girl you like," she sings. There is no reason to worry about it, and whoever comes out on top in the AL West will be a team to like watching, even if it's the Angels doing the French part of "Partition."

Now Beyonce informs us at the start of "Jealous" that she's in her penthouse half-naked, and cooked this meal naked. I'm not entirely sure why someone might throw on a robe after making chicken cacciatore in the nude, but c'est la vie, I suppose. Beyonce continues getting dressed, and, "filling up this skirt, I look damn good, I ain't lost it." Well, Raul Ibanez turns 42 in June, and he's joining the Angels after a season with the Mariners in which he hit 29 home runs. That's a fine way for Los Angeles to replace some of the power lost when Mark Trumbo was traded to the Arizona Diamondbacks.

The two pitchers acquired in the Trumbo deal, Hector Santiago and Tyler Skaggs, should fill out the back end of the rotation, behind Weaver, Wilson, and hard-throwing Garrett Richards. The Angels' other big addition this winter is third baseman David Freese, acquired from the Cardinals for Peter Bourjos, who simply did not have a place to play in Anaheim.

Freese, who hit 20 homers in 2012 and nine this past season, is another hitter the Angels need to perform to his resume in 2014 after a disappointing 2013. It's going to be a very interesting season there, because who knows whether to expect the 84-loss team or the one that was so widely projected to be headed to the World Series a year ago.

"Rocket" is a song in which Beyonce devotes six and a half minutes to sex, from foreplay to orgasm to cuddling. The imagery is tremendously explicit and explicitly tremendous. It's amazing. Play it over a highlight montage of Trout, and he won't just win the MVP in 2014, the MVP will have Mike Trout's babies. Yes, the MVP is an inanimate object. Yes, that's how purely sexual the song is, all rockets and waterfalls.

Trout is the same age now that Beyonce was when Dangerously In Love came out and she sang the national anthem at Super Bowl XXXVIII. Can you even imagine that what's happened up to now with Trout is the Destiny's Child phase of his career? It's mind-boggling.

Drake is singing on "Mine," and Drake is pretty hit or miss. In this case, as with everything else on this album so far, it's a hit. After the raw energy of "Rocket," the song is a bit of a comedown, but only in the way that Adrian Beltre hitting behind Prince Fielder would be. There are three players in the major leagues who have hit 30 or more home runs each of the past three seasons — Miguel Cabrera, Jay Bruce and Beltre. That's it. I say this as someone who's been guilty of underrating Beltre in the past — that's done now. Beltre will be 35 in April, and by the time he's done, he could well be a Hall of Famer. So, what the heck happened to him for those years in Seattle?

Also, what the heck is audio from the Challenger disaster doing on Beyonce's "XO" here? It's actually a quite beautiful song, and with lyrics like "you better kiss me before our time has run out," the nod to mortality makes sense, but it's an odd choice. There's another old audio clip before "Flawless," as Beyonce and the other members of Girl's Tyme are introduced. That song starts off sounding like it's the lost track from Kanye West's "Yeezus," but then Beyonce starts singing, and, well, it still sounds like the lost track from Yeezus, just with Beyonce singing. It's kind of like how Yoenis Cespedes fits the A's. The Home Run Derby champion is the only player in the lineup who got to Oakland with any kind of ballyhoo, but he really just has his place on the team and functions just fine as an important cog in the lineup, not the leading star. Beyonce and Girl's Tyme lose on Star Search.

Seriously, who on the A's scares an opposing pitcher? Cespedes is there, Donaldson is there, Josh Reddick, Brandon Moss, Nate Freiman, Coco Crisp, Jed Lowrie. There's nothing scary about dealing with the Oakland lineup, but there's no soft landing for a pitcher. I was at Game 4 of the division series in Detroit, a game that Oakland lost 8-6, and it was striking how the order would just turn itself over from inning to inning — the flip side to not having a lineup with a blowaway star is that there is danger around every corner. There's nobody you're surprised to see hit a bases-clearing double.

That's the opposite of the Mariners. If Cano, Hart, Morrison, or Kyle Seager doesn't hurt you, it's not tough to navigate through the rest of the lineup. The problem for the Mariners is that even adding one more bat before the season doesn't make too much of a difference. "The laws of the world tell us what goes sky and what falls," Beyonce sings on "Superpower." In Seattle, where there is a lot of room in the outfield, too many things that go sky wind up falling in front of the fence, which does not portend particularly well for a player like Hart, who took an incentive-heavy contract after missing all of 2013 due to knee surgeries. It's a strange place to try to rebuild value as a right-handed slugger.

"Heaven" is the penultimate song on "Beyonce," and it's slow and haunting and sad. "Go on, go home," Beyonce sings in the funereal tune, and then comes "Blue," the song featuring Beyonce's daughter. The past, followed by the future, and right on back to Houston, where the Astros eventually will drop a tour de force on the rest of baseball the way that Beyonce did to the music world with this album. The question is whether, when the Astros do it, it will also be a surprise. If it's in 2014, it certainly will be.